Facebook tweaks Trending Topics again to offer more perspectives

Now you'll see a carousel of stories and other content for trending topics.

Facebook

Facebook says it wants to expose you to more news sources.

The social network on Wednesday said it revamped its Trending Topics feature -- which shows you buzzed-about news stories on Facebook -- to include a handful of stories on any given topic. Now, when you click on a trending topic, you'll see a carousel of stories from different publications that you can swipe through. You'll also see what your friends and public figures are saying about different topics.

Facebook is also trying to make the feature more prominent on phones. The social network is running a test with a small group of users that puts the top three trending topics in a your news feed.

Facebook has been accused of proliferating "filter bubbles," the notion that Facebook distorts people's view of the world because mostly everything they're fed on the site aligns with what they already think. The tweaks to Trending Topics seem like Facebook's attempt to quell that criticism.

This isn't the first time Facebook's made big changes to Trending Topics. In January, the company got rid of personalized topics and instead decided to show all Facebook users in the same geographic region the same lists.

And before that, each topic was accompanied by a short description. But Facebook nixed those descriptions in August after a major controversy last year. After reports that Facebook was trying to suppress news from conservative outlets, the company put the new system in place.

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